When she was seventeen, Yuko believed that books were windows.
She would sit at her desk long after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep, reading novels, essays, biographies, philosophy, and books about distant countries. She had no particular system. One week she might be reading a Russian novel; the next, a book about anthropology; after that, something about economics or astronomy.
What she loved was not knowledge itself, but the feeling that another human being had temporarily lent her a pair of eyes.
A book could make her understand why a stranger behaved as he did. Another could persuade her that an opinion she had always considered absurd was perfectly reasonable from another point of view. Some books contradicted one another completely, yet she enjoyed that contradiction.
At university, her friends sometimes teased her.
“You read too much.”
“Maybe,” Yuko would reply. “But how else can I find out what the world looks like from someone else’s head?”
Then she graduated.
Her first job began at eight-thirty every morning. There were trains, meetings, reports, overtime, dinners with colleagues, and messages that arrived on her phone even after she had gone to bed.
At first she continued buying books.
She bought them faster than she could read them.
Eventually, the books accumulated on a shelf beside her desk, their spines becoming a silent record of intentions that had never been fulfilled.
Then she discovered that there were easier ways to fill the empty spaces in her day.
During lunch, she read news summaries on her phone. On the train, she watched short videos. Before going to sleep, she scrolled through social media.
The phone had one enormous advantage over books.
It never asked her to sit still.
A book required twenty minutes of concentration before its world began to emerge. A phone offered something new every few seconds.
Years passed.
She married. Her husband was an engineer who was extraordinarily serious about his work. Their first child was born, followed three years later by another.
The house became a place of constant movement.
There were school forms, lunches to prepare, medical appointments, club activities, examinations, family trips, birthday presents, and messages from teachers. When the children were small, Yuko sometimes fell asleep beside them while reading them picture books.
Those books were for the children, however.
She rarely read anything for herself.
By then, her phone had become her principal source of information. She could learn what was happening in the world without opening a newspaper. She could watch lectures by professors she had never met, listen to interviews with writers, and search for explanations of almost anything.
She occasionally remembered the girl she had once been.
But the memory felt strangely distant.
Then, one spring, her younger child moved away for work.
The following year, the older one moved to another city.
The house became quiet.
At first Yuko enjoyed it.
She could wake up whenever she wanted on weekends. There were no school schedules. No one needed her to buy anything on the way home. She could cook only what she liked.
But gradually, the silence acquired weight.
Her husband continued working late. Even when he was home, his mind was often occupied by his company.
One evening Yuko asked him:
“Do you ever feel lonely?”
He looked up from his laptop.
“Sometimes,” he said.
Then he returned to his screen.
The answer was honest, but somehow insufficient.
Yuko began spending more time on her phone.
Yet something had changed.
The endless stream of information no longer distracted her. Instead, it made the silence more obvious.
One afternoon, while returning from the supermarket, she noticed a bookstore.
It was not a large store. Its front window displayed new novels beside books about history, cooking, psychology, science, and travel.
She stopped.
Through the glass she could see people standing quietly among the shelves.
For several minutes she remained outside.
Perhaps I could start reading again.
The thought was surprisingly frightening.
She wondered whether books had really changed—or whether she had.
When she was seventeen, she had believed that reading could transform her.
But perhaps that belief had been a product of youth. She had been impatient, idealistic, easily moved, and convinced that every new idea deserved serious consideration.
Now she was in her late fifties.
She had a mortgage, a marriage, children who had become adults, years of professional experience, and opinions that had hardened without her noticing.
What if she opened a book she had loved at seventeen?
Would the old Yuko return?
Would she once again become the girl who believed every argument, every character, every philosophy might contain the secret to life?
Or perhaps something more unsettling would happen.
Perhaps she would discover that the girl she remembered had never disappeared.
Yuko entered the bookstore.
She walked past the bestsellers and stopped in front of the philosophy section.
Her hand reached toward a book.
Then she withdrew it.
Instead, she picked up a novel.
She read the first page.
Nothing happened.
There was no revelation. No sudden return to her youth. No emotional earthquake.
There was simply a sentence, followed by another sentence.
She turned the page.
After ten minutes, she realized something had changed.
The book was not telling her what to think.
It was giving her a place where she could think without being interrupted.
Her phone remained in her handbag.
For once, she did not feel the need to check it.
She bought the book.
That evening, after dinner, she sat alone in the living room and opened it again.
Her husband was working in the study.
The house was still quiet.
But the silence no longer seemed empty.
Yuko smiled.
She finally understood something she had been unable to understand at seventeen.
Reading had never been a way of returning to the person she once was.
It was a way of meeting people she had never been able to meet—and, through them, meeting the person she had become.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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